When Gao Xingjian received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2000, The People's Republic of China reacted very strangely. For two decades the country had energetically campaigned for the award, from flying writers to Sweden to funding an anthology of writings by Nobel prizewinners. Yet the official response to the announcement was icy disdain, followed by censorship of Xingjian's books around the country. More curiously, many members of the country's literary community insisted that they were disappointed with the choice of Xingjian, a dissident writer who had lived in France since 1987. Why did the winner get the cold shoulder?

Julia Lovell's fascinating though sometimes stiffly written study explores the country's schizophrenia about the august literary prize: China's deep-seated fear that its literature will fall short of Western standards clashes with the country's resentment about having to look for artistic validation outside of its own borders and traditions.

The People's Republic of China has been long obsessed with accruing hard power, and particularly on assessing how the country measures up against other states in economic and military terms. More recently, Beijing has become increasingly conscious of soft power's value, leveraging to its benefit such coups as hosting the 2008 Olympics.

But for China to win a Nobel Prize for Literature, it has to meet artistic and ideological standards set by the West, and that raises disturbing issues about how the country will evaluate its own culture, past and present, and how it feels about its accelerating march toward modernization. Shouldn't the best of Chinese writing naturally hold its own on the world stage? But how can that happen if the books that are easiest to translate (often those less rooted in local history and culture), are those that receive the accolades?

Author Julia Lovell

China's “Nobel Complex,” as Lovell calls it, is generated by “anxiety about China's international status, ambivalence toward Western influences and values, and the relationship between Chinese intellectuals (especially writers) and national politics.” China is caught in a painful bind: it believes that its culture is both unique and needs recognition of that conviction from the West.

Literature is a particularly contentious area because Western claims for the universality of art conflict with China's belief that writing has its ideological purposes. “The concept of a ‘pure' art for art's sake literature still mixes uneasily with China's entrenched realist tradition and cultural nationalism,” argues Lovell.

For example, the Chinese government wanted the Nobel Prize partially because it would prove that the repression of Mao's Cultural Revolution had ended. Yet officials cheerleaded for the selection of a writer whose work projected positive images of the socialist nation, prose that trumpeted the country's nobility on the global stage. Ironically, in recent years, when the Nobel judges have chosen an author from a closed society, they have recognized dissident and/or experimental literature.

The result was that China's hunt for the prize morphed into a behind-the-scenes public relations game: China pushed for a politically acceptable choice to win the prize while suspecting that the Nobel judges would give the award -- under the facade of aesthetic excellence -- to a politically acceptable candidate of their own, which is, according to Lovell, just what happened with the choice of Xingjian.

Outside of government circles, many in the Chinese literary establishment have their own specific bones to pick with the Nobel judges. Some scoffed at the selection of Xingjian, arguing that his avant-garde writing style and distance from his country made it impossible for him to capture the realities of contemporary China. The heart of the complaint is that Xingjian and other Chinese authors who are admired in the West, such as Su Tong and Yu Hua, kowtow to Western artistic standards and consciously export homogenized (or out-of-date) images of their homeland for world consumption.

In their defense, these writers, many of whom are also bestsellers in China, argue that they are independent artists – they take what they need from Asian as well as Western traditions. Amid the positioning of various politically correct agendas, the individuality of creative accomplishment is lost.

Still, Lovell notes that China's writers and government share a common obsession: they worship authors from the West rather than books by writers from Russia or India. This fixation on Europe and America remains strong today, even though, now that a market economy has taken a hold in China, writers as well as the government are much less interested in winning the Nobel Prize for Literature than they were a decade ago.

The name of the game today is sales rather than prestige. Still, pressure remains on writers to somehow woo a world readership with books that represent China in a nationalistic light, either the propaganda desired by the government or the cultural particularity demanded by Chinese writers who fear the price of global success. For Lovell, the battle between intellectual freedom and chauvinism will continue for the foreseeable future:

“Intellectual nation building and the desire for the Nobel Prize have held literary intellectuals ransom to a collective identification with “the people,” and turned literature into an international ambassador for China. But as long as the nation-state remains the principal unit of accounting in global transactions, as long as intellectuals remain opinion makers in nations around the world, national identity and literature continue to exercise a powerful hold over global consciousness.”

In this regard, The Politics of Cultural Capital is not only a fascinating X-ray of China's struggle to reconcile the localized values of its literature with the translation-friendly demands of international politics, but suggests the rewards and hazards for any developing country on the hunt for soft cultural power. The sardonic lesson of Lovell's book may be that, when it comes to the growing competition to accumulate cultural capital around the world, the contestants will never be satisfied, even when they win.

(Read The World's interview with Julia Lovell)